Radeon OpenGL Driver Lands Experimental Option To Boost Performance For CAD Software

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon OpenGL Driver Lands Experimental Option To Boost Performance For CAD Software

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has introduced an off-by-default option to help with the performance for at least some CAD-type applications...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RadeonSI-OoO-CAD-Option

[brent]

In addition, there are a bunch of new optimizations in the works for the generic OpenGL handling code in Mesa and glthread:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/..._requests/4314

At least for the example given, this appears to have a huge impact. I'm curious what it'll do for other apps or games.

[qarium]

this is maybe the start of the end of the amd closed source driver on linux.
maybe they are successful in supporting OpenGL CAD-type applications on the opensource driver.

if this is successful we maybe see the closed source PRO driver go away.

[OneTimeShot]

this is maybe the start of the end of the amd closed source driver on linux.
maybe they are successful in supporting OpenGL CAD-type applications on the opensource driver.

if this is successful we maybe see the closed source PRO driver go away.

I can't imagine that maintaining two drivers is anything other than a pain in the neck for AMD. If it's anything like companies that I have worked at, it probably only exists as an old folder in source control and its future lifespan is mostly related to that of the build server's hard disk...

[creative]

Just ordered a Red Devil 5700xt, don't use CAD but it's nice to know the new support is there for extra performance if I choose to start using it for that.

[Tuxee]

Just ordered a Red Devil 5700xt, don't use CAD but it's nice to know the new support is there for extra performance if I choose to start using it for that.

Have fun setting up the OpenGL support with an RX 5700 - at least when sticking to Mesa... It would be so much nicer, if ROCm would support the hardware.

[creative]

Have fun setting up the OpenGL support with an RX 5700 - at least when sticking to Mesa... It would be so much nicer, if ROCm would support the hardware.

From what I am reading with the newer kernels a good number of things work out of the box according to some of the post on the Manjaro forums with Mesa, I may have to setup stuff with both my GTX 1070 and RX5700XT both in my machine until stuff gets to where I want it for the most part.

I really kind of picked a bad time to put my card buy on credit with whats going on in the world right now but damn have I wanted an AMD GPU for so long now and it is now seemingly getting to the point to where people are having good enough (keyword good enough) success with these RX 5700's.... Not mature but good enough.

Being on Manjaro right now I would think it should not be as a bad as six months ago. Since it Manjaro is what I would..... could... consider bleeding edge, just a tiny bit behind Arch.

Only system I have liked enough to have had the same install for well over a year and that's from a complete hardware platform upgrade minus the AMD GPU stuff. Really impressed so far with Ryzen 3000.

[zboszor]

This article downplays the significance of the previous unreported work. Quote from this just merged MR:
"The improvement is only 7% in Viewperf11/Catia/test1 after all the other optimizations were merged. It's still significant."

On the other hand, Marek's comments to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/..._requests/3591 :

"I've changed the assertion to _mesa_warning, and added 4 more commits that increase the total perf improvement to 37%."

"I've added an RFC commit at the end that increases the perf improvement to 40%. It detects when it's safe to draw out-of-order and merges multiple Begin/End calls that have glDraw(Elements,etc) between them, so instead of DrawBeginEnd, DrawElements; DrawBeginEnd; DrawElements; DrawBeginEnd;, the driver only receives DrawElements; DrawElements; DrawBeginEnd;. The commit is very simple. Please let me know if this kind of stuff is OK to merge."

"Correction: The total perf increase with the RFC commit is actually 52% after I increased the immediate mode buffer size. Nuts."

The newly added optional 7% increase comes after the 52%.

[zboszor]

Another biggie from Marek is coming: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/..._requests/4314

Performance improvement of this MR in the game "torcs":

• +15% by default vs master
• +37% after enabling glthread vs master